hp-ux 10.x disk failure

[kursad simsek]

The disk failure occured in the system,most probably due to a electric down. The system now does not boot normally, in the middle of boot it says cannot read *** run fsck (not sure if this is the utility to fix hdd) and fix the problem and then press ^D to continue. When fschk runs it enters an interminable loop of question about sectors. when i press ^D to continue booting, the system boots CDE shows up and then if i run a software or do a #> find / -name "something" the system locks up...

I have several question about this subject

1) can it be a problem about the system failing to mount a partition (don't know how) how can i monitor the mounted partitions df command? and how can i check the partitions that are supposed to be mounted...

2) Is it possible to recover data i.e mounting this disk in a linux system? if i physically connect the SCSI disk to the linux system.

3) Is there a tool for taking an image file for the disk in hp-ux?

thanx in advance

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi,

First question to you is, do you have a backup ?

1) Yes, bdf and "more /etc/fstab" can show which filesystems is/are not mounted.

2) not to my knowledge.

3) ignite would be your tool.
www.software.hp.com and search for ignite

For know first check wich filesystem is not mounted. fsck this filesyem before you mount.

# fstyp -v /dev/vgXX/rlvolx ---> vxfs or hfs
# fsck -F vxfs -o Full -y /dev/vgXX/rlvolx
# mount /dev/vgXX/lvolx

Regards,
Robert-Jan

[kursad simsek]

I have hp-ux 10.xx (dunno the exact version how can i check it?) ignite-ux seems to be for hp-ux 11.xx. I have only the half-working system, and a linux system. Any clues to recover data? I verified the disk has no bad-sectors... So i know it is a problem about software

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

are you sure all filesystems are mounted, and they have no corruption ?

If you have the time and a maintance window for a reboot, boot it in single user mode, mount /usr and fsck all filesyems.

[kursad simsek]

is there a tool for disk copy /image backup for hp-ux 10.xx?

And does it back up all disk? i mean when i restore the image, can i use the disk of the same type as an exact copy of the previous?

[Howard Marshall]

I have some fairly simple questions for you.

Are you using LVM?

Is the disk that failed the boot disk?

fsck is the file system check, it only checks and repairs the file system not so much the hdd its self.

fsck may not be in a loop, it may be going through a very very long list of sectors depending on how big the file system is. you may try it with the -y to automatically fix things as it sees fit. the risk there is that you may loose some data but if you cant see it or copy it any way its effectivly gone any way, at least if you fix the file system you could restore it from backup.

to answer your questions, 1 yes a sufficently corrupt file system can appear to lock find. 2, I doubt it espically if you are using lvm, if one unix can't read it, another one probably cant either. 3 yes, there are several toos for taking an image file of a disk depending on what you actually want. for instance vgcfgbackup will create an image of the volume group structure, dd will do a full data dump, tar and cpio will create archive files and ignite (yes its available for 10.x too) can make a very nice recovery tape.

Hope that helps some.

Howard

[kursad simsek]

I have run fsck so many times even with the -y parameter and it finished all the process... but it just happens to be the file system /dev/vg00/lvol3 (and i guess yes this means the system was set up using LVM) . while the systems starts up, it says cannot mount the /dev/vg00/lvol3 it needs to be fsck'ed to be mounted. but the interesting thing about is lvol3 is the root file system. and when the system boot in single-user-mode when i run bdf command i see the root mounted and swap partition mounted. lvol3 is the root volume, if it can mount the root why lvol3 is corrupted. After running fsck on lvol3 it happens to unable to read some blocks, so the file system cannot be mounted.

anyhow i guess i have corrupted the disk partitions by some tool, and i was unable to access it from linux (it took me one day to find out) all i need now is a raw hdd copy tool, to replicate a running hdd to the corrupted one...

[Charles McCary]

Ignite works in 10.20 as well, just make sure you get the right version.